Taiichi Ohno's Workplace Management

Taiichi Ohno created the Toyota Production System, and this book collects his own statements about it in a form closer to spoken instruction than to a treatise. The English translation appeared decades after the Japanese original and reads as a series of short chapters, each making one point.

Ohno's positions are frequently uncomfortable. He insists that managers must observe the work directly and at length, and describes making engineers stand in a circle on the shop floor for hours until they saw what was actually happening. He argues that averages conceal everything that matters, that data should be distrusted in favour of facts observed personally, and that the words of the person doing the work are more reliable than any report. He explains asking why five times to reach the cause of a problem rather than its symptom, and gives the worked example of a machine failure traced back to a missing filter.

On the production system itself he covers standard work as the baseline against which improvement is measured rather than as a fixed procedure, the deliberate creation of problems by reducing inventory so that they become visible, the andon cord that lets any worker stop the line, and the reversal of conventional thinking about production quantity. He is explicit that the system exists to reduce cost by eliminating waste, and that everything else follows. The book is short and repetitive and the translation is uneven. It is the primary source for ideas that most lean literature restates.